Who Answers What to Which? A Critical Examination of Survey Items in Measuring Public Attitudes Towards the British Welfare State

The British Social Attitudes Survey (BSAS) is a rich dataset that enables the examination of attitudes toward the British welfare state spanning four decades. The data has led to important findings around such attitudes, including that there is a persistent gap across time in Britain between people who find the income difference between those with

high and low incomes too large, and those wanting government to address such concerns through financial redistribution. However, while numerous studies have explored attitudes toward poverty, economic inequality, benefit-recipients, and redistributive policies by government using survey items from the BSAS, there is little scrutiny on whether

such items adequately represent the concepts they claim to measure, differences in meaning across items, and how the British population vary in their answers within and across survey items, by important demographic factors such as age, income, and gender. In bridging this gap, this research's aims are as follows: 1)

to review and synthesize the usage of BSAS survey items across studies, 2) utilise BSAS survey items related to welfare state attitudes to examine the overlap in meaning between items and 3) analyse how socio-economic and demographic factors affect responses to these items. The goal in these regards is to garner a more comprehensive

understanding of such attitudes and provide a framework for future analyses to grapple with welfare state attitudes in a consistent manner.